How did you go from 0 to 20K mrr ? It's not really clear in the charts. Looks like the most difficult step for many boostrapers, the difference between "Default alive" and "Default dead" as PG says.
To be honest, the whole secret is in the product itself. At the very beginning we wanted to do everything faster - more features, more blog posts, more visitors, more backlinks etc. Did not work well.
Then we decided to stop - pause any ads and promotion and 100% concentrate on the product, improve everything we have, do not add any big features. We talked a lot with our customers, found out what they liked/disliked the most. I would say that this is what helped our product. At that time we completely rewrote the whole project.
At the beginning, a huge part of leads came to us through the partner websites (tools we integrate with). Now there is more organic traffic. Someone mentioned us somewhere, referred to a friend.
The most important thing is to achieve the Aha! moment as quickly as possible. When you client realize the profit from using your tool. Integrations in our case. New lead register an account in Everhour, finishes quick onboarding wizard and can immediately see the timer button and other controls in his/her Asana, Trello, Basecamp or GitHub interface. It takes maximum 5 minutes.
Cold emails doesn't work well for us. Or maybe we aren't doing it well. Anyways, we try not to bomb our clients with tons of emails. Today it's annoying. If you need a hand, we have a chat window or we offer a free one-on-one demo.
We were listed here before even had a product. Collected mailing list. After public release, this service brought us about (I don't remember exactly) 700 or 900 signups.
Try to spend a few hundred or thousands $$ on Google ads and add Intercom or Drift on your landing. Try to chat with visitors. I think you'll get some insight.
Be sure to read reviews about existing products on the market. What pros and cons their users write (Capterra, G2Crowd, TrustPilot, TrustRadius).
How did you go from 0 to 20K mrr ? It's not really clear in the charts. Looks like the most difficult step for many boostrapers, the difference between "Default alive" and "Default dead" as PG says.